Set in Style

I’m editing a client alert (about laws regarding campaign contributions) when I run across the following:

This bar extends to indirect contributions, for example, reimbursing a corporate employee who makes a contribution from his or her own funds.

This is a fairly common construction in legal writing. But it’s not an acceptable construction. Why? Because it fails to follow the rules.

The attorney who wrote the alert meant to write a complex sentence: an independent clause, and then a dependent clause preceded by a subordinate conjuction or a relative pronoun. But for example is neither a conjuntion nor a pronoun; it’s a prepositional phrase.

The fix? Here it is:

This bar extends to indirect contributions, such as reimbursing a corporate employee who makes contributions from his or her own funds.

Oops! There’s another grammatical error. An act (reimbursing an employee) is not a thing (a contribution). So, I apply another fix and come up with this:

This bar extends to indirect contributions, as when a company reimburses employees who make campaign contributions.

That’s it! Well . . . not quite. The lawyer who wrote this alert has to find something to quibble about. He says, “the revised sentence doesn’t cover the case where just one employee is reimbursed for just one campaign contribution.”

I could say, “this is a client alert, not an appellate brief. It doesn’t have to be so precise. We don’t want to sacrifice readability for precision.”

Or I could suggest the following:

This bar extends to any indirect contribution, as when a company reimburses an employee for making a campaign contribution.

But I don’t. To keep changes to a minimum, I revise the sentence like so:

This bar extends to any indirect contribution, as when a company reimburses an employee who makes a contribution from his or her own funds.

And then I let it go.

This entry was posted 4 March 2008 at 18:21 and is filed under Client Alerts, Copy. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.